Of more than 5,100 professors at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, 28 are Black. Geologist Adriana Alves is one of them.
An associate professor at the university’s Institute of Geosciences, Alves studies how volatile material spewed by ancient volcanoes might have influenced Brazil’s climate in the past.
The road to that research had many barriers.
As a child, Alves inherited a love of reading from her mother, a housekeeper who always got books from her employers. “In school, I was always at the top of my class,” she recalled. But at the beginning of her undergraduate studies at USP, geology “sounded like Mandarin.”
The public schools she had attended all her life had not prepared her for the challenging course load at the elite university. She worked twice as hard to catch up with her peers. “Then I fell in love with fundamental crystallography, and it all started making sense,” she said.
Her university years were tough. Challenges at home and a long commute made Alves decide to live on campus, unofficially sharing a dorm with other students.
“It is exhausting always having to show you’re good enough and prove skeptics are wrong about you.”
“The undergraduate scholarship I got from a research project did not cover all living expenses, so I gave tutoring classes, which was great because I learned and taught at the same time.”
Alves also had to deal with another issue: race. “I remember in sixth grade my mathematics teacher was sure I always cheated in exams,” she said, “because it didn’t make any sense that I got such high grades.” Her non-Black peers received no such skepticism.
“It is exhausting always having to show you’re good enough and prove skeptics are wrong about you,” Alves said. Now, as a professor, she is involved in human rights commissions within the university to help make the path for students today easier than hers was. “For many years I kept my distance from racial issues because that hurt. It still hurts,” she said. “But now, the academic environment is becoming more inclusive, and debate is possible.”
—Meghie Rodrigues (@meghier), Science Writer
This profile is part of a special series in our August 2024 issue on science careers.